Behind the scenes: Rural Remix podcast
Last year, the Rural Assembly and Daily Yonder collaborated to reimagine our podcast channel. Together, we transformed the interview-centric Everywhere Radio into Rural Remix, a wide-ranging audio platform to tell deeper, richer stories about life in rural places.
This year, our team is at work on two new series and looking for more captivating stories to tell. Read more below about what’s happening on Rural Remix in the coming months and how to catch up on past episodes.
New this year
Daily Yonder reporter Claire Carlson is bringing her smart and curious Keep it Rural newsletter and column to the podcast. Carlson delivers musings on rural news, exploration of rural culture, and queries about rural life.
In a recent episode, Carlson discusses a Colorado effort to reintroduce gray wolves and the debate over humans’ place the natural world. Give it a listen.
Coming soon: Home Cooked
Home Cooked: A 50 Year History of Meth in America is a multi-episode series from Daily Yonder reporter Olivia Weeks and producers Susannah Broun and Joel Cohen that will explore the evolution of methamphetamine use in the United States. In the early 2000s, the “Faces of Meth” were tacked to cork boards in high school hallways and the nightly news was full of meth lab explosions. The stimulant was stigmatized as a “white trash” drug, and thought to favor rural trailer parks and farmhouses over inner-city drug dens.
Today, however, domestic meth labs are obsolete, and meth use is growing fastest among urban populations in big, East-coast cities like New York and Boston.
What changed? And why was meth seen as a “hillbilly drug” in the first place? Weeks asks these questions and more in this insightful series that will debut this spring.
Share your stories: Rural food traditions
Rural Food Traditions: Bread will be the first in a series sharing the rich traditions behind rural foods. We’re starting with bread — cornbread, fry bread, tortillas and more. We plan to share stories from across the country — and we want to hear from you about your cultural or family bread-making traditions.
To share your story, email us at assembly@ruralstrategies.org with a brief overview of your tradition and why it matters to you — we may be in touch to include your story on the podcast! Read more about our call for stories here.
Catch up on past episodes
We launched the new channel in October —prime Halloween territory for our first offering, The Rural Horror Picture Show, a five-part cultural series examining the depiction of rural people and places in horror films. (This also made for some spooky season TikTik fun.)
Listeners have been treated to a variety episodes since, like this interview with small town arts leader and a look at how farmers in rural Illinois are going after broadband funding for their communities. You’ll find all of these and more on the Rural Remix feed.
Don't miss an episode
Follow along with Rural Remix as we continue spotlighting unexpected rural stories with each episode. You can find Rural Remix on various podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and more. Listen to the latest episodes and subscribe on your podcasting service of choice to keep up with Rural Remix.
Rural Remix is a co-production of the Daily Yonder and the Rural Assembly, both projects of the nonprofit Center for Rural Strategies. For more information about Rural Remix, send us a note.
